


Small Desert, Big Kiss

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Foo Fighters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-21
Updated: 2005-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:00:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,914
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dave Grohl's skipped town to jam at Joshua Tree- and with Joshua Homme. Taylor's out to find him, one way or his mother. This story did not invent The Desert Sessions, Queens of the Stone Age, and the Foo Fighters; they invented it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Desert, Big Kiss

**Author's Note:**

> Written for sidewinder

 

 

Dave's doing the right thing when he meets Josh. Making contacts, bigger, better, writing songs, working hard. Playing hard too, like he always has though the grip of the Crown bottle is not what it used to be and he puts it away, idly thinking that he'd lose his tolerance, emerge like a phoenix, an untouched teenage girl having schnapps for the first time, and he'd bury himself giggly into his friend's van and puke in his mother's purse.

He wanted to be a cheap date again. And have someone take advantage of that.

He has odd little wishes like this ( _Taylor understands, maybe too well, frolicking in a girl's backless top trying on wigs, he had kissed him on the cheek and said he always thought he'd be a B-cup_ ) and he admits he's in a unique position to indulge them, air them in the open and be loved for them, but he's forgotten how to appreciate that fact below the surface. That's where he is, you know, mentally, inside the recording studio, diddling around with a Probot riff when the invitation comes.

Josh Homme is a brick shithouse, on peyote. It seems wrong somehow, that someone so tall is in rock, and Dave confesses privately he has a vicious Napoleon complex that rears up at these moments. Josh is a desert rat and moves with equal ambling ease around abandoned piles of tires and a cluster of cacti reaching out with spiny arms, but he is as pale as a Victorian heroine with soft skin, and so much of it, cluttering up the vision of anyone who's watching. More people are watching than admit it.

This is supposed to be a rock democracy, Dave reminds himself. He got away from L.A. for a reason. He's not even sure how he's going to get back, and that feeling is electric, raw. Almost new.

It's not that he doesn't love the music, because he does, he fucking loves the music, feels utterly possessed by it. It feels like real, transformative rock and roll, strong like a thump to the chest to stop a coughing fit. Josh goes into those periodically, big barking gasps, and then lights a cigarette to compensate. What's a rotten habit to others just seems permissible if you're a redhead, sitting on an oil can talking to a living legend with stars in his eyes.

"I figured when people said you're a fan of me that they were trying to fuck me," murmurs Josh around a cloud of smoke. He bats it away with the back of his hand. Dave laughs heartily, feeling the crunch tiny rocks and beasts under his hips as he rocks back, buying time. Josh raises a bendy eyebrow and throws the match into a pool of liquid nearby.

"Don't knock it," he said, "I did fuck them. Woo!" he cries as the liquid abruptly caught flame. He stood and stomped at it, carefully so the rubber on the soles of his shoes wouldn't melt, and then kicked dust around it until the flames were extinguished. Dave watches. This act is holy, in some weird-ass way, and it's not because the sky is wide and deep, or that the gonzo troupe are dancing on top of cars, but because this is finally the right time in his life, to go back and move forward, snuff the fire and go with the flow.

He wonders where Taylor is.

*

Taylor's been doing the wrong thing since he left Los Angeles. First of all, why was he driving alone? Dave had insisted, in his own boss-of-the-band way that he was going to take a goddamn bus to Palm Springs and that the Foos were allowed, nay bestowed a week's vacation. Nate and Chris were probably fucking _golfing_ now.

Taylor has done a lot of things, heard a lot of them and beyond a studio in Alexandria, a house in friggin' Encino, now we have lost a great rock legend, no a great cuddly man with changeable facial hair in Dave Grohl because he has been eaten by a fat chick with ginormous tits at a road stop because the gas station ran out of Slim Jims. He's chewing on his hair when he thinks about it.

Her huge face would be surrounded by tight permed spirals of henna, her arms would quake like (a bowl full of jelly? No, that's stupid), and then, snuffed forever, is his best friend, his would-be lover (shut up brainmeat, it's never gonna happen), his guiding light of rocking out.

Where was he? Hold on, he'll ask that pile of rocks. With his _dick_.

Things were going to be okay once he saw that big bonfire, he just knew it. And Dave would be happy, maybe even drunk a little, and would wrap his painted arms around him and--ahhh, nothing like a piss in the dust. He'd give that giant redheaded ringleader of this mess that small due, this feels good, or right even, as the Death Valley desert wrings his soul dry into the mountains.

*

So how's the girlfriend, Joshua ("You should understand ahead of time, that people call me Baby Duck. Cause of this cowlick" and Dave had reached out and tried to smooth it down and then touched the same place on his skull and he was certain his water bottle had been spiked if he hadn't brought it himself, to tap against the glass of the bus windows while thinking about becoming a VH1 special) asked, his cowboy boots making v-shaped divots into the sand.

Dave was wondering if he was talking about Jordyn or Taylor. The loud statements of his public life were blending with his private life under the stars and Josh, wise like nobody's ever told him to be, is waiting for an answer.

"Okay," Dave says, tongue thick, "Cool," he adds, in case that makes for a better answer. There's a buzzing to the air, and it seems to him that maybe the amplifiers have exploded under the heavy net of stars and the sound improvising power chords but he's wrong because Josh is rocking on his side, groping at his ass and pulls out his cell phone. It wasn't surprising, not to Dave anyway, that of all people nestled in the crotch of the desert, Josh would be the one with working reception to the rest of the world. He is silent, reading almost with his lips moving.

"What's this supposed to mean?" he asked Dave after a moment, lit green and spooky by the color of the text message.

It said: " **COCKSUKER ILL FIND U SMALL DESERT BIG KISS THAWK** ".

Dave looks at the message and with the dread of a Hitchcock heroine creeping around a dark corner, scrolls down until he hits the number. LA County area code, familiar digits jumping in his palm, and he is on his feet, looking for headlights of a too-new Volkswagen because that silly ditsy surf blond had got it into his head to come rescue _him_ from debauch.

Right.

*

Taylor was on the move. He might have run over an antelope, or an old lady behind him but fuck `em. Even if pulled over he could recite the alphabet backwards, never mind that he had learned it from Sesame Street long ago when he was whacking off to the human guest stars, any of them, because messing around to puppets was just messed up.

But no drinking, not yet, not before the mobile unit of Hawkins Investigators pulled over by the side of the rock road, sat down at the kit, pulverized it to the remaining members of the Scorpions and War, then slung one Mister David Eric Grohl over his shoulder and found some kind of barn to yell at him in.

It could happen, I mean look at this place. It was just awesome enough to try to keep the adrenaline momentum up, just for that prize of shock. Especially if the barn had hay. Yeah, hay.

The radio was on the fritz and CD player had the goddamn (burned, take that!) Queens disc in there so he could just hear the mystic wail of the big lug who had decided to seduce his bandmate away from his god given record deals and all nighters in the backwoods of Virginia, and maybe the worst part of it in Taylor's mind is that he can't stop singing along.

And for that, Joshua Homme, he of the Elvis sneer and arm tats, is on his hallowed shit list. After the aforementioned barn dance he had planned. Right. And since he'd announced himself, it is now time, said Taylor, putting on the brights, to make a grand entrance.

He manages to downshift enough not to crash into some big spiny tree thing, three teenagers sitting on gas cans, and from the looks of it, Simon Le Bon.

*

"Is it that you got a leash on him or he's got a leash on you, David?"

Taylor is standing on top of his car now, somehow barefoot and people are crowding around. They're holding up broken drumsticks and he lies on his stomach, t-shirt riding up, shorts riding down, to play a riff on his front headlights, then jumps up.

"Ow, that motherfucker is hot!" and catches his eye. He points the remaining splinters at him and suddenly it's as if everyone who's been trying to ignore an accidental celebrity in their midst has gotten their license to stare back. "You!" He jumps off, wincing at the impact (probably got some glass shards in there) and marched hard to Dave, who was certain that if he hadn't already had a dream like this, he'd at least made a video like it. _And the Cowardly Lion was there, and you, Auntie Em..._

And Taylor marches right past Dave and leaps on Josh, who shoulders the burden like a big Nordic mother carrying a nursing baby on her hip and gently plucks away Taylor's face which was attempting to lick his eye.

"I believe this is yours," Baby Duck says with that odd courteous menace of his and bends down and deposits Taylor at Dave's feet. He bellows to the crowd "Sorry, I don't fucking hear you rocking!" and picks up a guitar from the dirt himself. He strums out something hard, elemental and groovy and Taylor feels a lilt of desire and gratitude come through him at the same moment as the shame kicks in, so he manages to stand up and feel, for once, completely normal.

"Hey," he says to Dave. Dave's wide-eyed but smiling. "Is there a barn around?"

"You know, you broke up what could have been a great thing just now," says Dave plainly, staring at Joshua's broad back and swinging hips. But he has a smile on his face and Taylor's hands ache to tug that dark unruly lock of hair by his ear just so back into place so that his mentor, his fake girlfriend, his one and only, looks just as on top of things as he always is. And Taylor knows the only thing he's got going here, in the bed of the most talented, screwiest and hardest-drinking people in the universe, is that he can never really go wrong with just one man.

"He's too tall for you anyway," Taylor says. And as Dave wraps him in a headlock while managing to grope his ass, life is perfectly fucking awesome.

 

 

 


End file.
